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Damned mountains!

It starts looking pretty decent, till we get to the mountains. And this is where I always have a problem.

I completely and utterly screw up the mountains and elevation in general. Because in virtually every tutorial I have read they basically say "Ok, go forth and make mountains." And show pictures of how wonderful theirs look and then I go at it and completely ruin my map.

People make it sound so easy, but for me anyway, it's mind numbingly hard. Of course it also doesn't help that my PS7 only undos 1 step. But even excluding that, I simply don't understand how to make it look good.

And this REALLY frustrates me because I love how the map is looking otherwise.

There has been some good tuts about mountains but I would also suggest just stealing real earth mountains for your map. You can get height maps, contours or other types from the web. Nasa images are usually public domain so generally they are safe to use.

Have a search for Pasis tutorial which I recall did some good mountains as part of it. Also with PS7, I would check out the preferences or options. Usually, apps have an undo limit or a RAM limit set aside for undo. Its normally more than 1.

I don't have much in the way of artistic ability. I think we'll all agree to that after looking at Exhibit A:

By following tutorials for a tool called Wilbur (there are a number of them hereabouts), I was able to get Exhibit B:

Still no trace of artistic ability, but it has some (very) basic technical merit.
The ideas are simple: make a mask for the coast, one for the mountains, and one for the forests. Combine the coast and mountains as shown in http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...ew-Found-Lands, then raise the forests up a little and add some noise to get some texture on them. Save a lighted map from Wilbur. Make a river flow map and save that, too. Finally, load up your color base in your image editor, load the river flow, and add the lighting map using your prefered blending mode (multiply is a little dark, but it works well).